“You know, he is still a great sax player,” I tell myself while listening to Abdullah Ibrahim’s ‘Celestial Bird Dance,’ the opening number of his 2015 Sunnyside release, The Song Is My Story. A series of solo explorations – two on saxophone, fifteen on piano – , the disc is a...

In these two works by Danish composer Louis Glass, musical reflections of our natural world are unmistakable; the idyllic air of a bucolic life surfaces time and again. Glass provides both works with descriptive titles – the third symphony is subtitled “Forest Symphony” and...

It is highly likely that no period in jazz history has so thoroughly split opinions on the value and quality of its output as did the decade of the 1970’s. And it was in the realm of amplified, hedonistic jazz-rock, or fusion as it is more commonly known, where that split became most...

Oehms Classics has released this collection of six sonatas, trios and concerti by Telemann, all but one appearing as a world premiere recording. Playing on period instruments, L’Accademia Giocosa (‘playful’) is made up of members of the Bavarian Radio Symphony, together with...

If you missed this album of Scottish composer William Wallace’s orchestral music when it was first issued by Hyperion in the late ’90s, you have another chance to obtain it with this reissue on the label’s mid-price Helios line – at about half the price of the original....

The Swiss composer and jazz pianist Marc Perrenoud has released a delightfully hip new trio record entitled Vestry Lamento. Produced by Double Moon Records Label & Challenge Records International, the album was first released in Europe in October of 2013, and has recently been made...

The Dutton record label initially built its reputation issuing audiophile-quality transfers from 78-rpm shellac discs recorded between 1920 and 1970. While the label has continued this thread of activity, it also issues world-premiere recordings of little-known but deserving works by...

For those listeners not familiar with the work of the American composer Stephen Paulus, this recent release from Naxos serves as an excellent introduction, offering superb performances of Paulus’s orchestral music from Giancarlo Guerrero and his Nashville Symphony. Paulus was born in Summit,...

This recording on Hyperion’s mid-priced Helios imprint was made in 1998. If you missed it the first time around, you can, and should, remedy that now. The music is performed by long-time Hyperion artist, Marc-André Hamelin, a pianist who time and again has exposed the extraordinary...

Saxophonist and composer Chris Potter’s triumphant, expansive, visionary and boundary-blurring new release Imaginary Cities marks his second as leader for the ECM label, following 2012’s “The Sirens.” The creative impulse here stems, in part, as Chris himself puts it, from a...

Billy Hart has done as much as anyone alive to master the vocabulary of jazz drumming. Mr. Hart (b. 1940) has been the beat behind over 500 albums by artists ranging from Sam & Dave to Pharoah Sanders. With The Montgomery Brothers and Jimmy Smith in the ‘60s, Miles Davis and Herbie...

Much of the music of Joaquín Turina (1882 – 1949) is reasonably well represented on disc, including his songs, pieces for solo piano and for guitar, and some of his orchestral works. In the area of chamber music, however, aside from a few of his most popular pieces, little has been...